Alpharius wrote:
Also, I'm tempted to change the title of this thread.

 d-usa wrote:
There was an outbreak of panic...

 d-usa wrote:
There was an outbreak of panic...

 MrDwhitey wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
There was an outbreak of panic...

But considering it was from one person, and there was only one* case in the US... wouldn't that mean the title would be accurate?

*it was one right?

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
Braaains...


(Although this thread might not be a good place to look for them )

 Alpharius wrote:

Also, I'm tempted to change the title of this thread.

Nicholas G. Evans wrote:Ebola Is Not a Weapon

Stop it. Just stop it. Ebola isn’t a potential weapon for terrorists.

It isn’t, as reported by Forbes and the Daily Mail, a low-tech weapon of bioterror for ISIS. It isn’t the final refuge of a lone wolf on a suicide mission, in the words of Fox News. It isn’t a U.S.-built race-targeting bioweapon, as the leader of the Nation of Islam declared.

Ebola is very real, and very scary. But this outbreak isn’t a recipe for a bioweapon. Not unless you want to be the most incompetent bioterrorist in history.

First, the virus isn’t a viable bioweapon candidate. It doesn’t spread quickly—its R0, a measure of how infectious a virus is, is about 2. That means that, in a population where everyone is at risk, each infected person will, on average, infect two more people. But because someone with Ebola is infectious only when she shows symptoms, we’ve got plenty of chances to clamp down on an outbreak in a country with a developed public health system.

And unlike some bioweapons, such as anthrax, Ebola’s transmission mechanism makes it really hard to weaponize. Anthrax spores can be dried and milled so they form little particles that can float on the air and be inhaled. Ebola requires the transmission of bodily fluids, and those don’t make efficient or stealthy weapons.

(And no—even though you may have heard this—Ebola is not “airborne.” The one study everyone talks about showed that pigs could transmit Ebola to macaques through an unknown mechanism that may have involved respiratory droplets. The researchers noted, however, that they couldn’t get macaques to transmit it to each other. The take-home from the study is really that pigs can spread Ebola.)

This alone pretty much rules it out as a bioweapon. A terrorist organization would have to go door to door with bags of blood and vomit to infect even a handful of people—and you’d probably notice it.

What about “suicide sneezers,” you may ask? Someone who deliberately infects herself with Ebola and then proceeds to pass it on to others?

That’s a losing game for the terrorist. Someone with Ebola isn’t infectious until she has symptoms, and even then, there is often only a small window for action before the disease takes hold. Many people who contract Ebola do so while caring for someone who is crippled by the affliction. A terrorist who wants to infect others isn’t likely to be functional enough to run around spreading the disease for very long—and even then, will find it hard to transmit the virus.

As for conspiracies about engineered Ebola, we know the virus appeared in 1976. The 1970s was also a time when genetic engineering was in its infancy—no one could’ve engineered a virus, even if he’d wanted to. Short of a time-traveling bioterrorist, that particular theory isn’t tenable.

What about now, though? Could a bioterrorist group—or, more likely, a secret national bioweapons program, like the one run by the Soviet Union during the Cold War—take Ebola and modify it to be airborne or more contagious? It isn’t likely. Why? One, because it is really difficult—we just don’t know enough about viruses to spontaneously engineer new traits. There is also a whole host of other nasty bugs that are already better designed to be weapons. Bugs like smallpox. If terrorists are going to go to all the trouble of engineering a bioweapon, they are likely to pick a much, much better starting point than Ebola.

Finally, even if one of these unlikely scenarios came to pass, what enemy is going to be able to claim to have weaponized Ebola and have anyone believe them? ISIS and other militant groups rely on carefully managed reputations to achieve their goals. Executions and explosions work for terrorists because there is something to be gained in doing so: fear, and credit for causing fear. There’s nothing to be gained in using a disease like Ebola during an outbreak because it is difficult prove it was deliberate, and thus you can’t brag about it.

The fear that an emerging infectious disease could in fact be a weapon is not new. In 1918, Lt. Col. Philip S. Doane voiced a suspicion that the pandemic “Spanish flu” strain was in fact a germ weapon wielded by German forces. More recently, an Australian professor of epidemiology argued that Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome could be a bioterror agent. People love to craft theories that provide malevolent agency to disease outbreaks. Yet while bioterrorism is possible—advances in technology are making that easier—for now, nature is almost always the culprit.

Ebola isn’t a weapon; it’s the collision between humans and their environment. It’s about the failure of public health in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. And it’s a failure, on our parts, to act and assist the people of these countries. That’s a failure of trust.

In developed countries, the biggest threat is not the terrorist, but fear. That fear is causing lawmakers to campaign for stepping up screening, even though it is unlikely to work—it is too hard to track people in air travel, and it isn’t effective at detecting cases. That fear is causing politicians to claim that we should seal the border to Mexico, or ban all flights out of West Africa.

That fear is a powerful weapon that can be used against us. Terror leading us to make bad decisions is much more effective against rich, developed nations than Ebola could be. If we want to beat the latter, we have to beat the former.

To beat Ebola, we have to worry less about terrorists, and more about helping others.

Nicholas G. Evans is a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in biosecurity, bioterrorism, and the ethics of pandemic disease.

 Ouze wrote:
Wellll... I think there actually is a way to weaponize it, in a way.

1.) Get someone who has ebola but is not yet infectious. There should be a pretty good supply in West Africa, right?

2.) Smuggle them through the Mexican border Have them take some aspirin to dampen down the fever and fly into the US.

3.) Wait for the person to die, and then dump the body into a shared water tank. Or maybe exsanguinate the victim and just dump the blood - Ebola can live in pretty cold temperatures.

Right?

 Ouze wrote:
Wellll... I think there actually is a way to weaponize it, in a way.

1.) Get someone who has ebola but is not yet infectious. There should be a pretty good supply in West Africa, right?

2.) Smuggle them through the Mexican border Have them take some aspirin to dampen down the fever and fly into the US.

3.) Wait for the person to die, and then dump the body into a shared water tank. Or maybe exsanguinate the victim and just dump the blood - Ebola can live in pretty cold temperatures.

Right?

 Jihadin wrote:

Focus is now to try to catch the infected at the airports at start and end points.
AS I mention before on this thread about using this as a weapon. I mention it as a mass scare tactic.

 d-usa wrote:
It's scary stuff out there guys, never let your guard down!

 d-usa wrote:
Some random guy in Oklahoma City who showed up to a hospital in Oklahoma with fever and nausea. Despite never having been to West Africa and despite never having contact with anybody from West Africa the hospital decided to announce that he had "Ebola-like symptoms" to the news before the State Department of Health and the CDC smacked them in the head.

 d-usa wrote:
Some random guy in Oklahoma City who showed up to a hospital in Oklahoma with fever and nausea. Despite never having been to West Africa and despite never having contact with anybody from West Africa the hospital decided to announce that he had "Ebola-like symptoms" to the news before the State Department of Health and the CDC smacked them in the head.

 Jihadin wrote:
Lie's. The government is covering it up to avoid mass hysteria and Wiggin out

 Hive Fleet Cerberus wrote:
Its spreads through bodily fluids, so basically just dont go touching random pools of blood or having "relations" with people who bleed through every possible orifice. Even if they DONT have ebola, that cant be fun.

 Jihadin wrote:

 Hive Fleet Cerberus wrote:
Its spreads through bodily fluids, so basically just dont go touching random pools of blood or having "relations" with people who bleed through every possible orifice. Even if they DONT have ebola, that cant be fun.

When one sneeze's a fine mist of snot spreads through the air

 d-usa wrote:
Probably another doffing mistake would be my guess.

From everything we know Ebola should be fairly simple Droplet Precautions, but we keep on using these giant space suits that the health care workers in the US have never really used before on any regular basis. I wouldn't be surprised if using isolation gear that is more complicated than required could end up resulting in more exposures due to not being familiar with using it and having much more complicated doffing procedures.

 d-usa wrote:
But is it officially an outbreak now???